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Without Immigration, U.S. Economy Will Struggle to Grow
Slowing labor force growth is the product of a number of factors—the aging of the U.S. population, retiring baby boomers and declining birth rates. But another element is immigration.
Global Perspectives: Glenn Hubbard on Immigration, Economic Dynamism and Limits of Monetary Policy
Hubbard and Dallas Fed President Rob Kaplan discussed his experiences working in the George W. Bush administration and immigration's impact on the workforce.
Spanish-Speaking Growth in Texas Reinforces Need to Close Education Gaps
The Eleventh Federal Reserve District has the second-largest native Spanish-language population in the Federal Reserve System. That population will grow further as the number of Hispanics exceeds 20 million in Texas alone by 2050.
Texas Birth-Rate Decline Complicates Economic Growth Prospects
Lower birth rates are associated with less growth and a more rapidly aging population and, hence, slower economic expansion.
Working Paper
Immigrants in the U.S. labor market
Immigrants supply skills that are in relatively short supply in the U.S. labor market and account for almost half of labor force growth since the mid-1990s. Migrant inflows have been concentrated at the low and high ends of the skill distribution. Large-scale unauthorized immigration has fueled growth of the low-skill labor force, which has had modest adverse fiscal and labor market effects on taxpayers and U.S.-born workers. High-skilled immigration has been beneficial in most every way, fueling innovation and spurring entrepreneurship in the high tech sector. Highly skilled immigrants have ...
Working Paper
New Findings on the Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2016) report on the economic and fiscal effects of immigration included the first set of comprehensive fiscal impacts published in twenty years. The estimates highlight the pivotal role of the public goods assumption. If immigrants are assigned the average cost of public goods, such as national defense and interest on the debt, then immigration?s fiscal impact is negative in both the short and long run. If, instead, immigrants are assigned the marginal cost of public goods, then the long-run fiscal impact is positive and the ...
Working Paper
Harmonized Population and Labor Force Statistics
The official labor force statistics often exhibit discontinuities in January, when updated population estimates are incorporated into the Current Population Survey (CPS) for the current year but are not revised backward through history. We construct harmonized population estimates spanning five decades and produce new weights for the CPS microdata that are benchmarked to these estimates. Using these weights, we estimate harmonized labor force statistics that reflect the latest available information about the population and its characteristics. The harmonized labor force series are free from ...
Journal Article
Immigration Shortfall May Be a Headwind for Labor Supply
U.S. labor markets are currently experiencing unprecedented labor shortages. Reduced immigration flows in recent years have contributed to these labor supply shortages and tightened labor markets. Industries, occupations, and regions that rely more heavily on foreign workers have been particularly affected.
Working Paper
The Effect of Immigration on Local Labor Markets: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure
In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigration by imposing country-specific entry quotas. We compare local labor markets differentially exposed to the quotas due to variation in the national origin mix of their immigrant populations. U.S.-born workers in areas losing immigrants did not gain in income score relative to workers in less exposed areas. Instead, in urban areas, European immigrants were replaced with internal migrants and immigrants from Mexico and Canada. By contrast, farmers shifted toward capital-intensive agriculture, and the immigrant-intensive mining ...
Working Paper
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries
We quantify the barriers to the economic integration of immigrants using an occupational choice model with natives and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We show that key parameters, including wedges, can be estimated to match the distribution of employment and earnings across individuals and occupations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., accounting for 7 percent of immigrants' overall economic contribution. These gains arise from increased labor force participation and from reallocation from manual toward ...